Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Dan Contreras
John Merryman
INTER
Paul Harrison
Tom Seligman
Lynn Meskell
o n e i n an occasi onal seri es of arti cl es about mul ti di sci pl i nary teachi ng and re s e a rc h
STANFORD RepORT
Buying, Selling,
Owning the Past
9
C O L L A G E B y A n n A C O B B ; M A D E W I t H I M A G E S f R O M t H E C A n t O R C E n t E R f O R V I S u A L A R t S A t S t A n f O R D u n I V E R S I t y, P A u L H A R R I S O n A n D f L I C k R P H O t O S B y E R I C C H A n , R O B I n Z E B R O W S k I , n O A H G R A y, L A R A E A k I n S , A n D D I M I t A R D E n E V .
Buying, Selling,
Owning
the Past
NEIL BRODIE
C
rates of 15th-century objects found at shaking his head. “They won’t belongs to all of us as humans
Machu Picchu in the early 20th century concede any role to collectors John Merryman, generally credited and therefore should not neces-
today are housed at Yale University, and and dealers.” sarily remain in, for example,
Peru plans to sue to get them back. Merryman, generally cred- with establishing the field of art law, Guatemala; or, instead, one
The so-called Elgin Marbles were re- ited with establishing the field could argue that pre-Columbian
moved from the Parthenon in the early of art law, is interested in the is interested in the distinction between art is part of Guatemala’s specific
19th century and taken to London, distinction between heritage heritage, even though Guatemala
where they have been displayed ever and property. To his mind, heritage and property. To his mind, as such did not exist in the 15th
since. Athens’ new Acropolis Museum heritage is fuzzy and intangi- century, and should therefore re-
has a wing sitting empty, awaiting their return. ble, and therefore more easily heritage is fuzzy and intangible. main there.
Nearly a decade of litigation followed the discovery
of 9,000-year-old skeletal remains near Kennewick,
manipulated by source nations
and their champions. Claims of 4 One of the more prominent
participants in this debate is the
Wash., as American Indian tribes and scientists dis- “cultural heritage” do not suf- director of the Art Institute of
puted ownership based on “cultural affiliation.” fice, in his mind, as ownership claims. Chicago, James Cuno, who argued in a
And the former curator of antiquities at the J. Paul (The term cultural property first arose recent book that stewardship and broad
Getty Museum is on trial in Rome, accused of han- with the 1954 Hague Convention for access should take priority over legal
dling illegally excavated antiquities. the Protection of Cultural Property ownership, given that most countries
Stanford’s archaeologists and other scholars who after the massive destruction of World claiming objects—Greece, Egypt, India,
study the old objects we call “art” or “antiquities” fre- War II.) for example—are recent creations.
quently find themselves intervening in such contro- Archaeologists criticize Merryman “That’s fine,” Brodie replied rhetori-
versies. The past decades have seen a booming inter- for condoning the buying and selling cally to Cuno’s argument, “but I’d add
national antiquities market in the context of sharply of unprovenanced antiquities, a mar- that there wasn’t any ‘art’ as we know it
defined sentiments of nationalism and ownership on ket he considers logical given what he until the 18th century either. It’s equally
the part of former colonies. Violent upheavals such calls “the human appetite for antiqui- constructed. Objects removed from their
as the ongoing wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and ties.” He is the author of an article ar- context become ‘antiquities.’ The real
John Merryman
Iraq— all sites of remarkable ancient treasures—fuel guing that Lord Elgin’s acquisition of question is sovereignty, not ownership—
the market. National and international bodies, most the marbles was legal and ethical for its the right of a country to have its heritage
notably UNESCO, have tried to curtail the illicit traf- time, and therefore should not be overturned now. laws respected by other countries.” This is also his ob-
ficking. Still, the world’s museums are full of objects On the other side is Neil Brodie, cultural heritage jection to what he calls Merryman’s “object-centered
that many people think don’t belong there. resource director at Stanford’s Archaeology Center. discourse of ownership.” Instead, he said, let’s look at
There are some, such as Stanford Law School Pro- He is the former research director of the Illicit Antiq- knowledge, at heritage.
fessor Emeritus John Merryman (88 and still teach- uities Research Centre at the University of Cambridge
ing), who say what’s done is done. In his view, ar- and an international expert on looting and the trade Looting the Middle East
chaeologists, including those at Stanford, are too in unprovenanced artifacts. “Everyone in this room has seen evidence of loot-
inflexible. The ownership-heritage argument can be tricky: ing, I’m sure,” Stanford archaeologist Daniel Contre-
“They say, ‘Collectors are the real looters,’” he said, One could say that pre-Columbian art, for example, ras recently told an audience at the Archaeology Cen-
A terracotta vase, c.
430 B.C., owned by
the Cantor Center.
L ara E a k i n s W es & E li S ha u n C he
ter. “I’m not sure I’ve ever been at a site where there and sell it to feed their children. Those stories can’t Safi, that has suffered the most looting. “This was in-
hasn’t been looting.” explain how the antiquities markets were flooded with dustrial scale,” he said, “and the material was headed
After the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, ar- Jordanian Early Bronze Age materials in the 1990s, straight for the antiquities market. So this can be a
chaeologist Elizabeth Stone, who teaches at Stony said Brodie, who believes the looting is an organized tool to stimulate policy.”
Brook University, wanted to quantify anecdotal in- response to a market, not the other way around. In theory, Brodie and Contreras say, using Google
formation about the pillaging of the “cradle of civili- Archaeologists are increasingly being trained in Earth for tracking looting could be an open-source
zation.” Funded by a variety of sources, she obtained geospatial techniques, and there is an active geo- project. People could add information and photos,
satellite images of some 1,800 sites in southern Iraq graphic information systems (GIS) community at monitor particular areas or issue alerts as images re-
taken before the invasion. By studying before and af- Stanford. Archaeologists here have used GIS for proj- veal possible pillaging. Such a project also could be
ter shots, she was able to identify looting patterns that ects in Mexico and Peru; the Spatial History Project, combined with a comparative pixel analysis of remote
revealed what was being taken and from where. led by historian Richard White, comprises several re- sensing images of pitted landscapes.
There are some who insist that reports of looting search paths using GIS; and staff at Branner Library The drawbacks to using Google Earth to moni-
in Iraq are the result of deluded journalists echoing and academic technology specialists are helping schol- tor archaeological looting are, principally, two: The
scholars with an agenda. ars in many disciplines incorporate GIS into their re- images are not always good, and you have to know
Brodie will have none of that. “There is no debate search. Contreras, a Stanford PhD and a lecturer in what you’re looking for. You can’t just scan the globe
about the looting,” he said. “We know what happened. the Anthropology Department, teaches a course called in hopes of finding pits. Brodie and Contreras chose
Media like to think we don’t.” Digital Methods in Archaeology. Jordan because they had a good database with which
Inspired by Stone’s example, Brodie and Contre- Contreras found that Google Earth was more effec- to compare the images. Contreras will next apply the
ras wanted to do something similar for the approxi- tive if used in conjunction with GIS software. So he technique to Peru, his area of expertise, for which he
mately 9,0000 square kilometers of Jordan. The prob- exported the geo-referenced Google images of Jordan also has a lot of data. So it’s not perfect. But, he said,
lem was that satellite images like Stone’s would have into ArcGIS, which makes it possible to precisely esti- “I reservedly recommend it.”
cost around $1.6 million, far beyond the resources of mate the extent of looted areas. Looting is detected by
the Archaeology Center. So they asked, what about the appearance of swaths dotted with pits that from From the caves of Afghanistan
Google Earth? They could pay $400 a year for the the air look like pockmarks. One of the chief arguments for removing antiqui-
deluxe version, put those images next to data gleaned “It’s almost like a smoking gun,” Contreras said, if ties from their site of provenance is safety.
from a good database and then trace the damage. an area near known Bronze Age sites is pockmarked “When people say, ‘It’s safer with us,’ I always reply,
“We wanted to see if Google Earth would be good and shortly thereafter the catalogs start advertising ‘Look at 9/11.’ There is no guarantee of safety in this
enough for this task,” Contreras explained. “Up un- those items. “John Merryman says enforcement will world,” said anthropology Professor Lynn Meskell.
til now, the evidence has been anecdotal. This will be never stop the market, and he is partly right. But there Beyond the fallacy of physical security, Meskell and
more systematic. We’ll be able to get a much better is educational potential on the demand side. If buy- others detect (and condemn) elitism in the assump-
idea of how many pits there are. And if people say ers were shown these images of damage, then they tion that an old bowl is better off in my city than in
there’s no looting in Jordan, now we’ll be able to say, couldn’t have in their head the image of a poor farmer your backyard, or in my climate-controlled museum
‘Oh yes there is.’” who sells a single pot to feed his children. Instead, than in your shabby building.
Above all, they wanted to have evidence to counter there are photos of large-scale, systematic looting, and But there are cases that stand out, and Afghanistan
those who insist on “chance find” stories—tales of sol- buyers are participating in the destruction.” obviously is one. By 1996, after the Soviet withdrawal
itary villagers who discover the odd pot here and there He showed an image of one of the Jordanian sites, and when the country was torn apart by internal war-